After the recent announcement that Aion's servers for the North American launch will all be hosted on the US east coast, players from the oceanic regions cried foul. Concerns over latency and playability performance were expressed in a massive thread on the AionSource forums which prompted debate for dozens of pages.

To ease the concerns of oceanic players, NCsoft West's community manager Ayase posted some reassurance.

It is correct that our North American servers are located on the US east coast, and the game servers for many of our other games have been for a long time as well. If any Oceanic players present here have participated in our closed beta stages, I do however think that most of you will be able to vouch for that this added distance does not constitute a major problem when it comes to latency.

Our servers are well-optimized and Aion is in its very core designed to tackle challenging client-server distances. Aion might not be launching with explicitly designated Oceanic Aion servers from day one, but we will carefully monitor the situation and if we see a large number of players experiencing issues as a result from their distance to our game servers we?ll make sure to take action; to do our best to prevent any such issues from continuing.

As a well versed company in the realm on online gaming, NCsoft certainly has the ability to gauge server performance across regions but as they say, the proof is in the pudding and only launch will tell us if the servers live up to the hopes of the oceanic playerbase.

Any oceanic players here that have played during closed beta? How did it run for you? Share your insight by clicking the "Post your comments" link below!